The Challenge

If you assume that a traditional understanding of leadership prevails in a manufacturing industry with primarily blue-collar employees, take a closer look at B.Braun’s production facility in Saxony. More than 1,000 employees work at the development and production facility for dialysers, and instead of silo thinking and rigid structures, empowerment and flat hierarchies are the norm.

Organisations that are driven by innovation are dependent on employees who support change. For this reason, B.Braun has been operating according to the bottom-up principle for some time now. The keyword is “shop floor empowerment.” Among other things, this means that employees are empowered to independently contribute ideas to the team. Above all, however, it also meant that a rethinking of the leadership practised up to that point had to be relearned. This is because empowerment does not happen overnight―neither on the side of the managers who “empower,” nor on the side of the employees who are “empowered.”

In order to be able to devote themselves to this responsible task and to establish a culture in which empowerment is truly lived out, the first step in the case of B.Braun was to systematically remove supervisors from the operative business. The initial goal was to instead enable managers to focus on the further development of their employees. To accomplish this, they received external support in the form of digital coaching.

The coaching from CoachHub started with teams who increasingly performed operative and not managerial tasks. Coaching was then expanded to include middle management as well as leaders on the executive level.

The Result

Before coaching was introduced at B.Braun in Saxony, employees had little or no contact with coaching. Working together with the coaches led to an awareness of their own management style as a first step. Next, coaches introduced other types of management styles for comparison. An awareness of how empowerment and agile work can be successful in practice was created, so that in the end they could adapt flexibly to the constantly changing market conditions. The flexibility as well as the large selection of coaches, which each participant could choose for themselves, was very attractive.

Digital coaching being independent of location, with sessions conducted via smartphone, proved to be an optimal situation. Interestingly, the majority of male participants expressed that they could address sensitive topics more easily with flexible digital coaching sessions. They stated that they would probably have opened up less if they had taken part in a face-to-face coaching session. This made it easier for the coachees to admit that they were in a challenging or even critical situation.

Due to the rapid introduction of coaching, the topic of leadership was dealt with very intensively. For example, as managers exchanged their experiences with each other, they discussed which approaches each person follows individually and who covers which fields of development with coaching. This exchange formed a closer trust and network of superiors. The network reached so far into the company that the question of how B.Braun wants to shape leadership in general was elevated and given much more attention.

Thanks to the coaching, there is now a systematic development of managers.